Wat Khnar Korkoh ruins remind Takeo of Khmer Rouge's assault on religion

• Published date: 28 February 2023
• Publication title: The Phnom Penh Post

Like so many other parts of the Kingdom, the Khnar Korkoh pagoda bears the scars of the terrible years of the so-called Democratic Kampuchea, when Cambodia fell under the tyrannical rule of Pol Pot's radical Marxist Khmer Rouge regime.

The chief monk of the pagoda, Soy Sothy, has preserved the ruins of the original temple, so the young will see evidence of the hated regime's abuse of the Kingdom's Buddhist beliefs.

He told The Post that he had been chief monk there for more than 15 years, and is the 15th man to hold the post. The pagoda - almost 100km from Phnom Penh, in Doung Khpos commune's Ta Sai village of Takeo province's Borei Cholsar district - is 217 years old.

The remote pagoda has limited funds, and just seven monks reside there. The abandoned brick temple in the pagoda is 15m by 12m in size, and was used as a salt warehouse during the Khmer Rouge period. The effect of the salt on the building's structure has made it liable to collapse at any time, and it has not been a place of worship for the past decade and a half.

'We are building a new temple to replace it, but as our funds are limited, we are building it in stages. We estimate the total cost will be around $400,000 by the time it is completed. We will keep the old temple as it is, because it serves as a symbol of how the Khmer Rouge tried to erase the Kingdom's deeply held Buddhist beliefs,' said Sothy.

Because of the pagoda's links to the darkest chapter of Cambodian history, Pheng Pong Rasy, director of Takeo Documentation Centre, under the umbrella of The Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), chose it as the location for a series of public forums.

Held in late 2022, the most recent forum educated more than 120 families about the history of the Khmer Rouge.

'As well as discussing the atrocities of that time, we discussed human rights and strategies to eliminate violence in our society,' said Sothy, who attended the forum.

Doung Khpos commune chief Chhim Chheng told The Post that although the temple was not used as a place of killing, it remained an important link to history.

'There are bullet holes and scars from explosions, but the fact that an important temple was used as a salt warehouse really shows young people what the Khmer Rouge tried to do. The dilapidated state of the temple serves as evidence for how devastated the Kingdom and its people were by those terrible years,' he said.

He added that DC-Cam had run annual forums there for some time. It provided non-violent dispute resolution...